


folded, and unfolded, and unfolding

by orphan_account



Category: Spider-Man (Ultimateverse)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Other, Threesome - F/F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-06
Updated: 2012-04-06
Packaged: 2017-11-03 03:15:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/376505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>after peter's death, it take more than a year for all the odd angles and torn pieces of their lives to settle into something right again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	folded, and unfolded, and unfolding

**Author's Note:**

> written for kabby who asked for post-death mj/peter/gwen. the title is from this [song](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0s7ycdUcHk).

  
The night before the funeral, the people who knew him best have a sort of memorial service for Peter in May Parker’s living room. It’s a mostly somber affair, with lots of tears, lots of repetitions of the phrase “I can’t believe he’s really gone” whispered with cracking voices. Mary Jane watches Gwen the whole time. The girl whose opinions are usually the loudest is oddly quiet through the whole thing, face blank. She doesn’t cry once. She just sits there and watches everyone else with those strange blue eyes of hers that seem sharper than normal.   
  
Bobby and Johnny go out around eleven to go fight some crime the way Peter would want them to keep doing in his absence. MJ thinks that they’re doing it because no one really knows what  _else_  to do. And maybe they’re lucky because they can actually hit something to get rid of some of the feelings of despair. Midnight hits and May realizes she’s out of eggs. Mary’s mom offers to drive her to the corner store since it’s so hard for them to do anything without emotionless paparazzi stalking them. That leaves her alone in the house with Gwen.   
  
Gwen, who doesn’t say anything once the front door shuts, just gets up and walks upstairs. MJ stands awkwardly in the living room for a few moments after that. She’s torn between being overwhelmed by her own feelings of grief over the loss of Peter, and anger at Gwen for being so selfish and closed off about all this. She’s quickly getting tired of feeling lost, so she frowns and walks up the stairs. She doesn’t even bother with knocking, she just pushes open the slightly ajar door to the bathroom, ready to give Gwen a piece of her mind.  
  
What she sees makes her freeze in the doorway. Gwen’s sitting with her back against the tub, curled into the smallest ball she can possibly curl herself into, shaking with tiny, barely restrained sobs. “Gwen…” MJ whispers, not sure what else to say. When she realizes there’s nothing much else she  _can_  say, she slowly walks into the bathroom and sits next to her friend.   
  
There’s a moment’s hesitation before she reaches out and gently touches Gwen’s shoulder. She’s surprised when that leads her having an armful of blonde. Gwen’s usually so careful about who she touches and who she lets touch her. Johnny and Peter are — were — the two who get to touch her without her initiating it. Mary’s only really been able to touch her twice — once during the flood, and once when Gwen hugged her after the thing with the shapeshifter. So this… This is a surprise. But it’s something they both need. They hold each other for what feels like hours, sobbing and sniffling until they feel like they’ll be sick. Mary Jane stays the night that night and they end up sleeping on the floor together, still clinging to one another.  
  
The night before Gwen and May decide to leave for France, Gwen sneaks into Mary Jane’s room through her window. They talk about anything and everything  _but_  Peter and all their friends until the wee hours of the morning. That’s when they go quiet. Gwen lays on her stomach on MJ’s bed and reaches out to gently stroke her fingers over a picture on the bedside table. It’s of MJ and Peter.  
  
“Why did you break up with him?” Mary asks before she can stop herself. For a moment, she’s mortified, but then Gwen shrugs.  
  
She shrugs, and she smiles sadly at the picture. “I freaked out. I freaked out, and that made me realize I didn’t know if I loved him or if I was  _in love_  with him.” She pauses for a moment, then continues, a little more quietly, “I never did figure it out. Not that it would’ve mattered much anyways.” She sits up then, and reaches out to poke Mary on the forehead. “It was never gonna be me.”  
  
In some ways, that’s more heartbreaking than watching the helicopter with May and Gwen take off the next morning. Not that the feelings do anything to make the bitter taste of jealousy leave her as she goes back to school the next week. Why does Gwen get to leave all of this behind when she’s stuck roaming the same halls, seeing the same people as ever, this time with more whispers of “She was dating  _Spider-Man_ ” floating around behind her?  
  
Her feelings of envy and loss definitely don’t do anything to make the bubbling anger in her go away when she sees the headlines. “THE RETURN OF SPIDER-MAN?” they scream at her. No, she thinks, no it’s  _not_  the fucking return of Spider-Man because not only is it the wrong costume, the person in it the wrong size and build, the wrong  _everything_ — No, it’s not. Because her boyfriend is still six feet underground and she can’t escape him. When she opens her door one day to see Gwen standing on her front door, bags under her eyes, a crumpled newspaper in her hands, literally shaking with rage, it does a lot to help her feel less alone.   
  
The “remixed Spider-Man”, as one paper calls him, sticks around even after Mary Jane, Gwen, and Aunt May have words with him. He sticks around, and it sucks, but Gwen sticks around too, which doesn’t suck at all. Their relationship has always been a little rocky, and Mary thinks it’s a shame they never really hung out all that much without Peter before. They clash quite a bit at first, old wounds still healing, as the two of them learn to deal with the grief that’s getting a little more bearable with each day. But they grow closer than either of them thought they could get as well. More often than not they spend the night together, staying up late and talking because that’s easier than dealing with other people who just don’t understand what it is to lose someone like they have.  
  
Months pass. Gwen turns seventeen, skips school that day, and doesn’t come home. MJ finds her in a park, coat unzipped, sitting on a swing, drunk off her ass. “I missed my last birthday, y’know. I was… dead and shit. Or SHIELD had me then, I dunno. Dates are all kinda fuzzy. But… But if that weren’t enough, I just thin—think that ‘m seventeen now. And he’s never gonna see seventeen.” Mary helps her stumble home and get into her pjs. She helps wash her clothes and hide the half-empty bottle of whatever cheap liquor Gwen managed to con someone into buying for her so Aunt May doesn’t freak out. And then she cries herself to sleep.   
  
She fully expects for there to be a repeat of the event with the roles reversed on her birthday. But a month after the night in the park Peter comes back to life. MJ doesn’t really understand the hows of it, probably because she was too busy listening to her heart pounding in her ears while Peter sheepishly explained. But she does know that he’s real, and he’s whole, and if the noise he makes is any indication, he really doesn’t mind that she’s pouncing on him with a kiss and not letting go for a long while.  
  
They walk over to where Gwen said she was going to study hand in hand. Mary sort of expects her to run up to Peter once she spots him and hug him, much the way she herself did. Just with less lip locking action. Instead, she freezes on the park bench she’d been sitting on outside the library while she waited for MJ. She freezes and her face goes blank. Peter stops walking a few dozen feet away from her and lets her stare for a moment in silence. Then he gives MJ’s hand a squeeze and lets go so he can walk the last little bit on his own.   
  
He kneels down on the slushy pavement in front of Gwen and gently puts a hand on her knee. She reaches out with one trembling hand and traces his cheekbone with her fingertips. Peter reaches up carefully and holds her hand to his cheek, closing his eyes. They sit like that for a moment, and then Gwen lets out a strangled little whimper. Peter turns his head, kisses Gwen’s palm, then scoops her up in a hug. She holds onto him tight, crying, and MJ is reminded of the night before Peter’s funeral. She feels like she’s intruding as she watches them whisper, talking just too quietly for her to make anything out.  
  
It’s more difficult than any of them want to admit to adjust to life again. Peter somehow manages to get everyone believing that, no, he wasn’t really Spider-Man. That was a mutant shapeshifter who stole his face and was trying to hurt everybody while he was off, kidnapped, in some country MJ’s never heard of before. (He seems just as surprised as her that it works on everyone except Jameson.) But even with that out of the way, everything takes adjusting to. It’s not like it was when Gwen came back where everything seemed to slot back into place. Gwen and Mary have both changed just enough that certain things just don’t fit quite how they used to. And there’s the obvious JohnnyBobbyKitty shaped hole in all of them that they have to learn to deal with all over again.  
  
But learn they do. The three of them become closer than ever, and Mary Jane’s never been more thrilled to have Peter around. It’s a terrible thing that it took his death to settle it in her chest, but there’s a thought and a feeling whenever she looks at him. “I am going to love him for the rest of my life,” it says. And sometimes it feels like her heart will burst right out of her with the force of her feelings. It’s overwhelming. Peter — wonderful, amazing, Peter — has some idea of just how overpowering is, if the fact that he can take her occasionally bursting into tears mid-make out session is any indication.   
  
Luckily, that’s a thing MJ gets over fairly quickly. Though the odd, mixed feelings swirling around in her are still there months later when she and Peter are kissing on her bed. She kisses him, and feels all that love, the slight hint of grief that still lingers in the strangest moments, and she thinks  _now_ . “Hey,” she mumbles between kisses. When that doesn’t get Peter’s attention, she grabs the front of his shirt and lays back on her bed so he’s above her.   
  
That makes him pause and stare at her seriously. “Are… Are you sure?” he asks, and she has to stop herself from giggling as his voice trembles. She feels just as nervous as he sounds.   
  
She nods and slips her hand under the front of his shirt, gently raking her nails down his abs and enjoying the way his eyes go half-lidded and he shudders. “I’m sure. I’m ready.”  
  
“Okay,” he says, swallows hard. “Okay.”  
  
It’s awkward at first, full of fumbling, shaking fingers, and muffled nervous laughter. But then his fingers brush just the right spot and she gasps, clenching the sheets in her hands. Peter smiles as he kisses her neck and looks at her with sharp eyes and an excited quirk to his lips. She’s seen that look on his face before, when he gets his hands on a science project that intrigues him. She’s about to say something about it when he touches her again, and whatever protest she has gets lost in a moan. Needless to say, she has a whole new appreciation for the scientific method before the night is over.   
  
Which is all she tells Gwen the next day. She laughs and MJ smiles even as she can feel her face heating up with embarrassment. Gwen teases her as they walk to the lunch room and Mary doesn’t think much of it. At least, not until Gwen says, “You know, you are one lucky girl, Mary Jane Watson,” and there’s something… off about her expression. It takes Mary until they’re in front of the double doors to realize what it is.  
  
She stops in her tracks and gives Gwen a wary look. “You figured it out, didn’t you? Whether you love him or you’re in love with him.”  
  
Gwen pauses with one hand on the door and looks back at MJ. A small, sad smile crosses her face. “I told you before, it doesn’t matter. You two are made for each other, I’m not going to fuck with that,” she says simply. Then she’s moving through the doors to where Peter’s sitting and the conversation is over.  
  
Mary Jane doesn’t tell Peter about it until weeks later when they’re laying on her bed staring at the ceiling, her head on his chest. The hand in her hair stills when she finishes recounting the conversation. She looks up, confused, and can’t help but notice the frown and somewhat guilty look on Peter’s face. Her own face twists into a frown as she pushes herself up and rests on one arm. “You still have feelings for her, don’t you?” The way Peter shifts and opens his mouth like he’s about to say something tells her everything she needs to know. “I can’t believe you!”  
  
“No! Wait!” He sits up and gently cups her face with his hands. She can feel her nose burning as her eyes fill with tears. “It’s not what you think, I swear. I  _love_  you, Mary Jane. I’m not—It’s not what you’re thinking at all.”  
  
“But you still have feelings for her.”  
  
He looks down and nods. “Some, yeah. But you’re the one I’m with. You’re the one I’m  _staying_  with. Because I love you. I’d marry you right now if I could, that’s how much I love you. Okay?”  
  
Mary puts her hands on his and nods, sniffling. “Okay… Yeah, okay.”   
  
Peter kisses her on the forehead and the conversation is shelved. Gwen is leaving in an hour for two weeks in Greece on some history-themed, summer break learning trip and they need to say goodbye. She’s so excited about getting to fly again and getting to see the old ruins that she doesn’t notice the way Peter’s smiles never really reach his eyes and the way he looks like something’s stuck in his shoe the entire time they say goodbye. She doesn’t notice, but MJ does.  
  
She doesn’t say anything about it, just thinks on it. She thinks, and she thinks, and she thinks, and when she’s almost certain she’s done thinking, she thinks some more. There’s so much thinking going on that she starts dreaming about Gwen. It’s not just about her, though. It’s dreams about her and Peter, kissing and touching each other. They’re dreams about the two of them that somehow morph into dreams about the three of them together. She dreams of kissing Gwen while Peter’s thumbs stroke slow circles on her hipbones and wakes panting, an uncomfortably pleasant feeling in her gut.   
  
It’s just the jealousy, she tells herself. The only reason she’s dreaming about this is because she’s thinking about Peter and Gwen together, she had the same kinds of dreams when they were dating and they stopped before, so they’ll stop again. Except they only really stopped after Peter died. They’d certainly dropped in frequency after she’d gotten back together with him, but they hadn’t gone away completely. And it would be a lie to say she’d never had a dream that starred only her and Gwen.  
  
Mary’s not exactly sure not to do with this, so she thinks some more. She blows off a date with Peter to think and can’t really say anything when he knocks on her window and lets himself in late that night. She just stays sitting on her bed, arms around her knees. Peter carefully sits on the edge of her bed and before he can ask what’s wrong she blurts out, louder than she intended, “I think I’m attracted to Gwen and I think I have feelings for her.”  
  
Peter stares at her for a long moment, speechless, mouth hanging open. “Oh,” is all he manages to muster after that long pause. There’s another bout of extended silence where they both stare at their knees before Peter asks quietly, “What do we do?”  
  
MJ uncurls then, and situates herself in Peter’s lap. “I don’t know.”  
  
The next day, the pair of the go to a library they’ve never been to before and they do research. Because that’s what Peter does when he has a problem he doesn’t know how to solve, he researches it until he has a hypothesis about how to deal with it. And MJ? She’s lost and confused and this is the only way she can think of to help settle her thoughts and feelings. Maybe if she can know that there are people out there other than her and Peter that have had to deal with this, it will be easier for her to cope with. Not that anyone else is going to know how crazy their lives are and how hard it is to live with sometimes.  
  
Mary bites her fingernails as she reads. Each book is more and more depressing. Some talk about historic sexuality, some talk about the sex lives of the kings and queens of whatever European country, and she really didn’t need to know all that about them. Others refer to “alternative lifestyles” and all she can think of is her mother’s disapproving face. There’s one odd book that seems to use the love and sexual intercourse of three people to summon a demon from the depths of somewhere or another. She slams that book closed when she gets to the diagrams, and waves off Peter’s confused look while her face heats up.   
  
Everything looks even more bleak when she hits the fiction section and the first book she discovers about a married couple being in love with another woman ends in tragedy. She’s not sure what she wants to do about this whole Gwen thing, but if the books are to be believed, her options are either hoping it goes away, watching her relationship slowly break apart because they’ve both got feelings for someone else, or trying to have a relationship the three of them behind closed doors. None of those options seem very good.  
  
They sit together on a bench in the bus stop in silence once they leave the library. “What do we do?” she asks quietly, unable to look at Peter when she does.  
  
Peter reaches over and slides his fingers through hers. He sighs quietly, “It’s up to you, MJ. You’re my girlfriend, and I’m not going to do something you don’t want me to. And she said she doesn’t want to interfere, so... It’s—it’s up to you. We can just not do anything about it.”  
  
MJ leans against Peter and rests her head on his shoulder. This whole research trip was supposed to help, but all its done is made her more worried and confused. “I don’t know what I want to do.”   
  
They let it drop. It’s the easiest thing to do. It’s like making a decision without actually making a decision. Things settle down, more or less, within a few days, and it’s easy to pretend that there was no confession, and there was no library trip. If Gwen notices the slight bit of hesitation Mary has at the beginning of their conversation the next morning, she doesn’t say anything. Things go back to what passes for normal for all of them.  
  
Except MJ still has dreams about Gwen. She still feels that odd, fluttery feeling in her stomach, the one she used to only get around Peter, when Gwen brushes up against her in the hallways. It’s like the more she tries to ignore the attraction, the more she’s reminded of it at inopportune moments. But it’s not until one awful and embarrassing night that she realizes just how bad it’s gotten.  
  
Peter’s out on patrol, her mom is out with her girl friends for the night, and it’s getting late. So Mary gets ready for bed, unlocks her window in case Peter decides to make a stop in after patrol and lays down on top of the sheets. She’s had that pleasant, yet uncomfortable with its timing, feeling of want in her gut all day, so she closes her eyes and slips her fingers into her panties. She imagines they’re Peter’s fingers, and that he's looking at her with that intense and focussed look of his that he gets sometimes. It’s easier to imagine now that they’ve actually had sex than it was before, and it’s easier for her to move just right — but the images in her mind get confused. Somewhere along the way it turns from Peter, to Gwen, to Gwen and Peter and she quietly gasps the wrong name as she comes.  
  
The moment she does, there’s a thud from the direction of her window. MJ yelps and sits up straight in bed, looking at her floor, horrified. Peter is sitting there, on her carpet, in a stunned and confused heap. MJ opens and closes her mouth a few times, looking for something to say and finding none. Luckily for her, Peter’s not quite as speechless.   
  
“I think we need to… do something. About all this,” he says. MJ nods, and she probably looks as miserable as she feels. But Peter drags himself up off the floor and kisses her on the forehead. “It’s okay,” he murmurs into her hair. “I’m not—I’m not jealous.” She’s about to ask how he can possibly not be jealous, but he rests his head where her neck and shoulder meet, and she can feel the heat radiating off his face. “That was kinda hot.”  
  
She laughs a little self-consciously and runs her fingers through his hair. She tries not to think about the fact that of course he thinks it’s kinda hot, he’s a seventeen year old guy who just walked in on his girlfriend having a good time. “Okay…” she says, “Okay, I’ll talk to her tomorrow.”  
  
The fact that the conversation ends up happening in a park, on the swings, exactly three hundred and sixty-four days after MJ found Gwen drunk and crying isn’t lost on her. If anything, it just adds a feeling of gravity to the situation as Mary Jane stares at the wood chips and tries to come up with the words to say what’s on her mind. Gwen’s rambling about something or another, she’s not really listening, and so she has no idea what she interrupts when she just comes out and says, “Peter and I are both in love with you.”  
  
Gwen falls off her swing in shock. “You—I— _what?_ ” she stutters out.  
  
Mary can’t help but laugh a little as she looks at her friend. “We’re kinda in love with you. And… I don’t know how to say this. Want to know if you want to go out with us? Both of us.” It’s strange, how a decision that has been causing her so much heartache and confusion for the past few months can be explained so simply.   
  
There’s a long moment of silence as Gwen picks herself up and stands in front of her swing. “It wouldn’t work,” she says finally. “You and me, we’re both way too prone to jealousy. We’d never be able to share him without one of us screwing up the friendship.”  
  
“We wouldn’t—It’s not sharing him. He wouldn’t have two girlfriends, it would be all of us together,” MJ explains. Gwen has a point, and it’s one she’s certainly wondered about enough, but she has to believe they can make it work. The alternative is unthinkable.  
  
When Gwen doesn’t say anything, Mary Jane has to resist the urge to bite at her fingertips. Instead of giving in to her nerves and telling Gwen to pretend this never happened, she stands up and carefully reaches for her friend’s hand. Gwen looks up at her, confused, and MJ takes half a second to steel her resolve before she leans in and kisses her.   
  
For one terrible moment, it’s awful. Gwen is frozen in shock and Mary’s beginning to wonder if she made a mistake. But then the hand in hers grips tight and her kiss is returned. Suddenly everything is warm and there’s butterflies in her stomach and she’s wondering what the hell she’s doing, but… It feels right. It feels like things have been leading up to this for a long time. And maybe they have, she thinks, remembering those nights when she and Gwen would curl up together on her bed and talk until they couldn’t keep their eyes open any longer.  
  
They have to wait until Aunt May goes to a work conference to really do anything else. Peter tells MJ that he talked with Gwen the night after the park, but it was a rushed conversation in hushed voices as they worked on homework in the living room. They couldn’t really do anything with his aunt able to walk in an awkward discussions at any given moment.   
  
But once she’s gone, the three of them pile into the attic and sit, awkwardly staring at anything but each other. There’s the elephant in the room none of them are quite sure how to address, and it just seems to grow larger with every passing moment. Peter looks at MJ questioningly and she nods, though she’s not sure what she’s approving. They haven’t quite mastered the art of communicating with just looks yet.   
  
He stands and carefully walks over to stand in front of Gwen. She looks up at him and Mary watches as Peter carefully reaches out and trails his fingers down her cheek the same way Gwen did to him when he came back. She closes her eyes and trembles ever so slightly. He leans in slowly and kisses her. It’s one of the softest and most hesitant kisses Mary Jane thinks she’s ever seen, and it’s nothing like she what expected out of Gwen. After a moment, Gwen slips her hand into Peter’s hair and suddenly the kiss is a lot more passionate, one of Peter’s hands slipping under the back of Gwen’s shirt, a quiet moan being torn from his throat as she gently tugs on his hair.   
  
MJ swallows hard as she watches them kiss, and shifts in her chair as they break apart, breathing hard. She would have to be blind to notice the unspoken understanding the two of them seem to have, but she doesn’t feel like she's intruding now. And she doesn't have time to feel jealous about it. Gwen looks over at her, lipstick smudged, and smirks. She carefully disentangles herself from Peter and walks over to Mary Jane. There’s one breathless moment where they just stare at each other, but then Gwen is kissing her the same way she just kissed Peter, and,  _god_  that feels good.  
  
When they part, MJ can’t help the smile on her face. She also can’t help but agree with Peter as he says, voice hoarse and awed, “I think this is one of the best ideas we’ve ever had.” And for the first time since he’s come back, all the odd angles and changes that never really felt quite settled fall neatly into place.


End file.
